November 06, 2018

The Art of Adornment: "Jewelry - The Body Transformed" @ The Met Museum, New York

Jewelry and decorative body pieces have always played a role in the life of different cultures and civilisations: open an illustrated history book and you will find images showing archaelogical findings such as Mycenaean glass beads, Egyptian collars or lavish paintings showing coronations of kings and queens wearing precious jewels.

Yet the exhibition "Jewelry: The Body Transformed" (November 12, 2018 – February 24, 2019) opening next week at New York's Met Museum doesn't look at jewels for their monetary value, but for their aesthetics and meanings, exploring their power also through photographs, sculptures and paintings.

The event is a collaborative effort between six curators from different departments including, among the others, the departments of Medieval Art, American Decorative Arts, Ancient Near Eastern Art, Egyptian Art and Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, that came together to select the over 200 pieces on display, all from The Met collections.

"Jewelry: The Body Transformed" opens with a symbolic display featuring pieces from all over the world, organized according to the part of the body they are supposed to adorn - from head and hair to ankles and feet passing through neck and chest, arms, hands and waist.

Visitors are then invited to wander around the different sections in which the exhibition is divided: "The Divine Body", examines links between jewelry and immortality through pieces found in burial sites; "The Regal Body" looks at jewelry used to assert rank and status; "The Transcendent Body", celebrates jewelry's power to conjure spirits, appease gods and evoke ancestors; "The Alluring Body" explores romance and erotic desire, while "The Resplendent Body" features elegant jewelry designed for luxury and opulent adornment.

Among the earliest pieces on display (dated 2600 B.C.) there are the strands of beads that come from the so-called Great Death Pit, one of the royal graves at Ur, in ancient Mesopotamia, where sixty-eight female bodies were discovered, all of them adorned with the most splendid jewelry made of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian.

There's a lot to discover in between necklaces and bracelets, earrings, rings and brooches, headdresses, pectorals, gorgets and arm bands showcased along with sculptures, paintings, prints and photographs.

Among the 200 pieces on display there are many highlights, such as the astonishing golden sandals and toe stalls dating 1479-1425 B.C. that belonged to the funerary accoutrements of an Egyptian queen of Thutmose III and were considered as a burial luxury to protect the delicate extremities of persons of status and royalty.

The Egyptian pieces are particularly beautiful actually and they include a floral collar from the funerary cache of Tutankhamun that was probably worn at a funeral banquet and was made with flower petals and blossoms, leaves, berries, and blue faience beads sewn to a papyrus backing; a broad collar made with colourful faience beads and a collar with faience blue beads, part of a set of funerary jewelry belonging to Wah, the estate manager of Meketre.

Materials vary, going from precious gold to more humble bronze, from rich sapphires and pearls to jade, ivory and shells. Quite often the pieces made with the humblest materials are the most intriguing: the Peruvian Spondylus shell and black stone beads collar from the 12th-14th century is for example characterised by a beautiful shape that allowed the design to fall on the shoulders and chest of the wearer.

Techniques are equally interesting: the exhibition features a set of jewels made with the shakudo, a technique in which coloured metal such as gold, silver and copper were inlaid into a dark patinated ground to resemble lacquer.

In some cases the pieces on display are linked to rituals and celebrations, among them there are elaborate marriage necklaces from India, ceremonial breastplates from the Solomon Islands made with the hard marble-like shell of the Tridacna (giant clam) and the gold crown decorated with bright emeralds made to adorn a sacred image of the Virgn Mary venerated in the cathedral of Popayán (Colombia).

Australian masks and African statues provide a break from the jewellery, while the photographs, drawings and paintings help visitors contextualising the pieces on display (check out Josephine Baker sensually smiling in a sparkling evening gown accessorised with long strings of pearls and posing on a glittering backdrop in a picture taken by Baron Adolf de Meyer).

Legendary jewelry houses as Castellani, Lalique, and Tiffany & Co. are also included, but you can bet that younger visitors and Alexander McQueen's fans will be happy to rediscover in the event pieces by two of his collaborators - Shaun Leane's bejewelled yashmak and Simon Costin's "Incubus" necklace.

Originally made for McQueen's S/S 2000 collection, the yashmak was reworked for the late designer's A/W 2009 collection, "The Horn of Plenty" and remade for the Costume Institute 2015 exhibition "Savage Beauty". The design combined the Islamic with the Medieval and with a touch of fetish as well, intertwining the Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and could be used as an example of a piece employed to manipulate and transform the human body.

Modern pieces of jewelry often tell stories and the "Incubus" necklace by Simon Costin combines beauty and horror, sex and death, and the twisted dark and decadent sensibility of J. K. Huysmans' A Rebours (Against Nature) with pagan folklore and the stories around the male incubus and the female succubus. The piece, featuring roots made from copper and phials referring to the five elements called upon in contemporary paganism - Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and Spirit - but containing sperm, was seized by the police when it was first displayed in a London gallery in 1987 and the artist was threatened with prosecution.

The meaning and purpose of the various designs included in this exhibition may be different, but there is something that reunites all the pieces on display: they are unique and rare and they are used to activate the body they adorn, turning it into a stage where a performance can take place.

"To fully understand the power of jewelry, it is not enough to look at it as miniature sculpture," states in a press release Melanie Holcomb, Curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. "While jewelry is ubiquitous, the cultures of the world differ widely regarding where on the body it should be worn. By focusing on jewelry's interaction with - and agency upon - the human body, this exhibition brings in a key element that has been missing in previous studies of the subject."

"Jewelry: The Body Transformed" will be accompanied by a rich program of lectures, talks, exhibition tours and hands-on art-making events for younger audiences.